PRAISE THE POST – AT 9:20 A.M. ET:  Yes, yes, the Washington Post is a liberal paper,  but it's done some very good things recently, like running a responsible and thoughtful editorial page.  And now the Post is doing what The New York Times does only to conservatives.  It is holding President Obama to a high standard of accuracy.  We give credit where it's due at Urgent Agenda, and the Post deserves credit for this examination of Obama's press conference yesterday:

In a bit of class jujutsu, the president six times mentioned eliminating a tax loophole for corporate jets, frequently pitting it against student loans or food safety. It’s a potent image, but in the context of a $4-trillion goal, it is essentially meaningless. The item is so small the White House could not even provide an estimate of the revenue that would be raised, but other estimates suggest it would amount to $3 billion over 10 years.

Meanwhile, student financial assistance, just for 2011, is about $42 billion. So the corporate jet loophole — which involves the fact that such assets can be depreciated over five years, rather than the seven for commercial jets — just is not going to raise a lot of money. It certainly wouldn’t save many student loans.

Going after hedge fund managers might raise about $15 billion over 10 years, but in a different life The Fact Checker covered Wall Street and is pretty certain those financial wizards would figure out a way to avoid this tax shift. John Carney of CNBC actually outlined how that would work.

And this from the president:

“Moammar Gaddafi, who prior to Osama bin Laden was responsible for more American deaths than just about anybody on the planet, was threatening to massacre his people. . . . As a consequence, a guy who was a state sponsor of terrorist operations against the United States of America is pinned down, and the noose is tightening around him.”

Yes, Gaddafi is a bad guy, but Obama conveniently ignores the fact that until the uprising, the administration was rushing to do business with him. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton met with one of Gadhafi’s sons, Mutassim Gadhafi, in 2009, declaring, “I’m very much looking forward to building on this relationship.”

We need more of this.  Had a Republican president engaged in the artistry that Obama engaged in yesterday, New York Times Washington writers would have gone into cardiac arrest simply rushing to their computers to give us the news of the deceptions.

Read the whole piece.  Fascinating stuff.

June 30, 2011